Complete solutions to every exercise in the NCERT Flamingo textbook, Chapter 7 “The Interview” (Part I is an extract from the Introduction by Christopher Silvester, editor of The Penguin Book of Interviews; Part II is an interview with Umberto Eco): the in-text comprehension questions printed beside Part I, Understanding the Text, Talking about the Text, Noticing Discourse Linkers and Signallers, Writing, and Things to Do. Try answering each one yourself first, then check.
1 In-Text Comprehension Check
NCERT prints five short questions in the margin beside Part I, before the formal exercises. The textbook numbers them 1, 2, 3, 6, 5, and they are kept in that printed order and numbering here.
Q. What are some of the positive views on interviews?
Answer: Some people make “quite extravagant claims” for the interview: in its highest form it is “a source of truth,” and in its practice “an art.” Silvester himself calls it “a supremely serviceable medium of communication,” and Denis Brian points out that today “our most vivid impressions of our contemporaries are through interviews,” since “almost everything of moment reaches us through one man asking questions of another.”
Q. Why do most celebrity writers despise being interviewed?
Answer: Many celebrities see themselves as the interview’s “victims.” They “might despise the interview as an unwarranted intrusion into their lives, or feel that it somehow diminishes them”. V. S. Naipaul feels that some people are “wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves”; Lewis Carroll had “a just horror of the interviewer”; Rudyard Kipling called it “immoral” and “a crime”; and Saul Bellow compared interviews to “thumbprints on his windpipe.”
Q. What is the belief in some primitive cultures about being photographed?
Answer: In some primitive cultures it is believed that if one takes a photographic portrait of somebody, then one is “stealing that person’s soul.” The essay compares this to the way some celebrities feel an interview “somehow diminishes them”.
Q. What do you understand by the expression “thumbprints on his windpipe”?
Answer: It is Saul Bellow’s description of how interviews felt to him. The windpipe carries air to the lungs, so thumbprints on it suggest being gripped by the throat and throttled. Bellow meant that being interviewed felt suffocating, painful and intrusive, even though he had consented to be interviewed on several occasions.
Q. Who, in today’s world, is our chief source of information about personalities?
Answer: The interviewer, through the interview. As Denis Brian says, “our most vivid impressions of our contemporaries are through interviews” and “almost everything of moment reaches us through one man asking questions of another.” Because of this, “the interviewer holds a position of unprecedented power and influence.”
2 Understanding the Text
Q. Do you think Umberto Eco likes being interviewed? Give reasons for your opinion.
Answer: Yes, Eco seems at ease being interviewed, unlike many of the writers named in Part I of the chapter. He answers at length and candidly, sharing personal anecdotes about his doctoral dissertation, his friend Roland Barthes, and his American publisher’s misjudged expectations for The Name of the Rose. He is also self-deprecating and humorous, for instance admitting he watches ordinary television after dinner. He does not share Part I’s hostility to interviews, though he admits (“Does that bother you?” “Yes.”) that being known to most people only as “the novelist” bothers him. He uses the interview as an opportunity to explain his own thinking.
Q. How does Eco find the time to write so much?
Answer: Eco explains that he works in what he calls “interstices”: “we have a lot of empty spaces in our lives. I call them interstices.” “I work in empty spaces,” he says. He compares this to the idea that if all the empty space were removed from the universe, even the space inside atoms, the universe would shrink to the size of his fist. His own concrete example is writing an entire article while waiting for a visitor’s lift to travel from the first floor to the third, a short wait.
Q. What was distinctive about Eco’s academic writing style?
Answer: As the interviewer puts it, Eco’s non-fiction has “a certain playful and personal quality”, a marked departure from the regular academic style, which is “invariably depersonalised and often dry and boring.” Eco explains this through the story of his doctoral dissertation: one professor said that scholars “make a lot of false hypotheses, then they correct them and at the end, they put the conclusions”, whereas Eco “told the story of [his] research. Even including [his] trials and errors.” His professor recognised this was effective and published the dissertation as a book. At 22, this taught Eco that scholarly writing should be narrated as a story, which is why his essays “always have a narrative aspect.”
Q. Did Umberto Eco consider himself a novelist first or an academic scholar?
Answer: He clearly considered himself an academic scholar first. Eco says, “I consider myself a university professor who writes novels on Sundays. It’s not a joke.” He explains that he participates in academic conferences rather than “meetings of Pen Clubs and writers,” and identifies with the academic community. He does admit that being known publicly only as “the novelist” bothers him, but he also accepts that by writing novels he reaches a larger audience: “I cannot expect to have one million readers with stuff on semiotics.”
Q. What is the reason for the huge success of the novel, The Name of the Rose?
Answer: According to Eco himself, “the success of the book is a mystery. Nobody can predict it.” When asked whether the success had to do with its medieval setting, he concedes, “That’s possible,” but notes that “A lot of books have been written about the medieval past far before mine.” He also says readers of such a book are those who “don’t want easy experiences”, while journalists and publishers wrongly believe that people like trash. He even suggests that if he had written the novel ten years earlier or later, “it wouldn’t have been the same,” concluding that exactly why it worked at that particular time remains a mystery even to him.
3 Talking about the Text
These are personal, discussion-based questions with no single fixed answer. A strong response engages directly with the chapter’s ideas and gives concrete, specific examples rather than vague generalisations.
Q. Talk about any interview that you have watched on television or read in a newspaper. How did it add to your understanding of the celebrity, the interviewer and the field of the celebrity?
Answer: A strong answer names a specific interview, describes at least one thing it revealed about the person being interviewed that was not already widely known, comments on how the interviewer’s questions shaped what came out (for example, whether the questions were sympathetic, challenging, or focused on personal versus professional matters), and explains what the answer taught the viewer or reader about the celebrity’s field of work, echoing how Part II of this chapter lets Umberto Eco explain both his personality and his ideas about writing and academia.
Q. The medium you like best for an interview, print, radio, or television.
Answer: A strong answer picks one medium and gives real reasons: print (a newspaper or magazine interview) allows a full transcript to be read carefully and quoted exactly, as this chapter itself demonstrates; radio conveys tone of voice and hesitation without the distraction of appearance; television adds facial expression and body language but can also make a subject more guarded or performative. The answer should connect the choice back to what a reader or viewer actually wants from an interview: depth and accuracy, or immediacy and personality.
Q. Every famous person has a right to his or her privacy. Interviewers sometimes embarrass celebrities with very personal questions.
Answer: Part I of the chapter supports this concern directly: some celebrities see themselves as the interview’s “victims,” feeling it is “an unwarranted intrusion” that “diminishes” them, a fear the essay compares to the belief that a photograph steals a person’s soul, and V. S. Naipaul is quoted saying interviews wound people and make them “lose a part of themselves.” A balanced answer should acknowledge this real risk to privacy, while also noting that the chapter does not present it as the whole picture: writers such as Kipling and Wells, who complained about being interviewed, went on to interview others themselves, and Silvester himself concludes that, despite its drawbacks, the interview is “a supremely serviceable medium of communication”. The fairest position is that interviewers have a responsibility to ask personal questions only where they genuinely serve the public’s understanding, not merely to embarrass or sensationalise.
4 Noticing Discourse Linkers and Signallers
Q. Notice how the utterances of the interviewer and the interviewee are linked to one another.
Answer: The book’s own worked examples from the Eco interview are: “I am convinced I am always doing the same thing.” linked by “Which is?” and then “Aah, now that is more difficult to explain.”; “…I have already written an article!” linked by “Not everyone can do that of course.”; “Novels probably satisfied my taste for narration.” linked by “Talking about novels,”; “…at least more than 20 of them…” linked by “Over 40.”; “…one million readers with stuff on semiotics.” linked by “Which brings me to my next question.”; and “…it dealt with a period of medieval history that…” linked by “That’s possible.”; and “Were you puzzled at all by this?” linked by “No. Journalists are puzzled.” In most cases, the link is made either through a reference pronoun (that, this, which) or by repeating a word from the line before, exactly as the book explains.
Q. Notice these two examples of signallers taken from the interview.
Answer: The book gives exactly two examples: “Which brings me to another question…” and “But let me tell you another story…” Both phrases prepare the listener for an upcoming shift in topic, rather than linking back to what was just said. Without such signallers, the book notes, “the flow of ideas in a conversation will not be smooth and continuous,” since the listener would be caught off guard by a sudden, unannounced change of subject. This matters especially in a structured conversation like an interview, where the interviewer must move between many topics without losing the thread for the reader.
5 Writing
Q. If the interviewer Mukund Padmanabhan had not got the space in the newspaper to reproduce the interview verbatim, he may have been asked to produce a short report of the interview with the salient points. Write this report for him.
Answer (a model report):
“A professor who writes novels on Sundays”: Umberto Eco speaks to The Hindu
By Mukund Padmanabhan
Umberto Eco, professor at the University of Bologna and author of the best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, says that behind his huge and varied output he is “always doing the same thing.” His academic work, his novels and even his books for children all pursue the same philosophical and ethical interests.
Explaining how he does so much, Eco said that he works in “interstices,” the empty spaces in our lives, such as the time spent waiting for a visitor’s lift to come up. His scholarly writing has a narrative, personal quality because, at the age of 22, he realised that scholarly books should tell the story of the research; he began writing novels only at about 50, by accident.
Although he has written over 40 scholarly works, most people know him only as a novelist, which bothers him: he calls himself “a university professor who writes novels on Sundays.” Eco was not puzzled that a serious novel found a mass audience, since some readers want difficult reading experiences. His American publisher had expected to sell no more than 3,000 copies, yet the book sold two or three million in the U.S. Why it succeeded, Eco says, “is a mystery.”
6 Things to Do
Q. Interview a person whom you admire either in school or your neighbourhood and record it in writing.
Answer: This is a practical activity, so every student’s interview will be different. Prepare five or six open questions in advance (about the person’s work, how they started, a difficulty they overcame and their advice for students), ask permission before recording, and note the answers accurately. Write it up in the interview format of this chapter: a short introduction to the person, then each question and answer, using linkers to connect replies and signallers such as “Which brings me to my next question” when you move to a new topic.